I recall one of my earliest radical impulses, derived from the spectacle I used to see when I stayed late in the afternoon in this library building. From regions unknown would emerge an army of old women with buckets and scrubbing-brushes; pitiful, wizened up old creatures crawling about the marble corridors on their hands and knees, mopping up the dirt of the students’ feet and the spittle of their mouths. Manifestly, this cleaning might have been done by machinery, it might have been done by able-bodied men with mops; but women were cheaper, and there were those in charge of the university’s affairs who cared more about money than humanity. Of course, we know what such persons will answer; the old women were glad to get the work. In the same way they answer that chemists and biologists and engineers are glad to get a chance to do research work, even at cost of their eyesight. At the University of Chicago they discovered that men were anxious to get such work, even at the cost of their health. In his book, “The Higher Learning in America,” Thorstein Veblen tells of an incident which happened in a certain laboratory “dedicated to one of the branches of biological science.” Having been for ten years a professor at the University of Chicago, Professor Veblen felt under the necessity of withholding names; but I am not under the same necessity, and I make so bold as to state that it occurred in the Hull Biological Laboratory of the University of Chicago. The building was supposed to be ventilated by a hot air system; fresh air was taken in from the outside, and warmed over steam coils, and distributed through the building. It began to be noted that members of the scientific staff were mysteriously falling sick. They would be forced to stay at home, or to take a vacation; they would get well, and then come back and get sick again. Finally, one professor went rooting about in the basement of the building, and made the discovery that the university authorities, in order to save the cost of heating, had boarded up the outside intake, so that the air which passed through the steam-coils was being derived in part from a manhole leading to a sewer. The great capitalist university had found it too costly to heat its Gothic halls—playfully described by Veblen as “heavy ceiled, ill-lighted lobbies, which might have served as a mustering place for a body of unruly men at arms, but which mean nothing more to the point today than so many inconvenient flag-stones to be crossed in coming and going.” CHAPTER LI THE UNIVERSITY OF STANDARD OIL